The measurement of intracranial pressure (ICP) plays a critical role in several neurosurgical conditions. Various pathological processes such as hydrocephalus, tumors, and trauma can cause alterations in the pressure within the skull. If not adequately controlled, increases in intracranial pressure (due to accumulation of cerebrospinal fluid, blood clots, tumors, or brain swelling) can cause secondary damage to otherwise healthy brain tissue.
A number of technologies currently exist to monitor brain pressure. Many of these rely on invasive techniques with percutaneously implanted sensors. Wires or fiber optic cables are often used to transduce pressure information from electromechanical or optomechanical transducers, which relegates these technologies to short term use. At the end of use these sensors are withdrawn from the body. Several disadvantages are associated with such devices: 1) the presence of a percutaneous probe increases the chance of iatrogenic infections such as meningitis and cerebritis; 2) the probe must be withdrawn at the end of use and so it is not reusable for subsequent episodes of suspected intracranial hypertension such as with hydrocephalus; and 3) the percutaneous cable is subject to mechanical failure and to inadvertent pull-out during routine patient care.
In an attempt to mitigate these disadvantages, numerous investigators have tried to develop non-invasive techniques for monitoring intracranial pressure. Such methods have employed mathematical correlations between physiological variables which can be transduced extracorporally such as blood pressure, heart rate, Doppler ultrasound of cerebral blood vessels, near-infrared (NIR) spectroscopy of cerebral oxygenation, retinal imaging, etc. While some success has been achieved in monitoring trends in ICP, no method has been fully successful in deriving the absolute intracranial pressure, and these known techniques have not gained significant clinical utility for monitoring ICP.